The history of one community or how to change thinking
After reading a lot of different articles from different users in the “Business Studio” section, I decided to share my story.
I consider work as a web developer in a web-studio, organization of my own business in this area as one of the most difficult and sometimes ungrateful classes in the IT field. Constant dumping in the market, misunderstanding of tasks by customers, tremendous competition, the struggle to optimize business processes - probably only a small part of what the head of the web studio faces every day.
I started working in this business back in 2004. Like, probably, in most beginner web developers, at the very beginning almost everything had to be done independently, taking orders, looking for clients, and developing websites. All this was done at home. At times it was so difficult that I often wanted to quit it all and do less stressful activities. On the other hand, apart from all the difficulties, this search made me feel independent, but for me it was the main thing at that time, so, probably, I remained in this business ...
')
Only two years later I had a team of like-minded people, I took out a loan, we rented an office, bought equipment and started working as an official company. We have invested our soul, knowledge, all our ideas and opportunities in this company, firmly believed that now nothing can stop us on the path to success, but, unfortunately, the difficulties have only multiplied ...
The basis of any web studio is the right strategy and good tools to optimize these solutions. Of course, as a small studio, we immediately began to study various free solutions (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress) and work with it. And everything seems to be okay, but our main task - to optimize the work and reduce time wasted on the implementation of projects, we could not solve.
And now, after much deliberation - it has been decided - we create our own product on which we will do projects, evaluate the pros and cons, choose the Framework, estimate the time and get to work ... product development, we are losing even more time and resources that could be used to fulfill orders to our customers and earn money directly. We take regular loans, lend money, start having problems with timely salary payments, even before this comes the crisis of 2008 and the loan taken in dollars is multiplied twice ...
All this, of course, affects the positive thinking in the team, and therefore, the development is even more delayed ...
In the end, we are ready to launch our offspring of ImageCMS, but the question arises - whether to launch the product in a free form (which, due to the money spent, for me personally looks like something unthinkable) or as a paid solution. Since things in the company started to go a little better, and the main goal of creating this tool was to optimize the company's work, the team persuades to launch the product as OpenSource CMS.
Since the system was originally created as an engine for corporate sites and portals, and the sphere of Internet commerce began to develop very quickly, another difficult decision was made - to write an extension for creating online stores based on ImageCMS ... And again a year of development and tests.
After the launch of ImageCMS Shop, no one could ever convince me of the expediency of launching the system free of charge: constant investments in development are needed - now two versions of the system, and the system turned out to be excellent))) to enable our partners to continue working with ImageCMS, without switching to other engines for creating online stores, we also immediately introduced an affiliate discount program, which generally resolved this issue and everyone was happy.
We have already launched many versions of our product, have significantly expanded the staff of our team and are already well developing in the field of web development - we see a clear perspective in this matter.
The only thing that doesn’t give rest is not quite the right vision, which over the years has been formed in our team: various departments work - Sales, Development, Promotion, Startups, but all are rather separate, there is no right goal, everything is aimed only at getting direct profit ...
And, as it seems to me, the solution was created - after interviewing all employees and searching for a new positioning of the company, we decided to move on as a community, and take the already existing ImageCMS community as a basis. After informing the ImageCMS community of this idea, we received a lot of joyful feedback and full support. It was decided to completely change the official website of the system, add many new opportunities for community members and partners, allocate resources in the form of managers, programmers to support the community, and also involve all programmers of our company to develop this area.
Together with the ImageCMS community, we plan not only to develop the system, but the entire web development sphere as a whole - to create useful tools, organize conferences, share success secrets, optimize our work as a whole and look for solutions on how to make our common business profitable as developers. and for customers.
Unfortunately, I have no opportunity to devote a lot of time to reading, but I want to highlight, in my opinion, very worthy materials that have changed my vision:
Richard Branson "To hell, grab and do"
Richard Branson "Nude Business"
Walter Isaacson "Steve Jobs"
Tony Shay "Delivering happiness"
ImageCMS community site (still 2.0): http://www.imagecms.net
I consider work as a web developer in a web-studio, organization of my own business in this area as one of the most difficult and sometimes ungrateful classes in the IT field. Constant dumping in the market, misunderstanding of tasks by customers, tremendous competition, the struggle to optimize business processes - probably only a small part of what the head of the web studio faces every day.
How it all began or the story of one web studio
I started working in this business back in 2004. Like, probably, in most beginner web developers, at the very beginning almost everything had to be done independently, taking orders, looking for clients, and developing websites. All this was done at home. At times it was so difficult that I often wanted to quit it all and do less stressful activities. On the other hand, apart from all the difficulties, this search made me feel independent, but for me it was the main thing at that time, so, probably, I remained in this business ...
')
Only two years later I had a team of like-minded people, I took out a loan, we rented an office, bought equipment and started working as an official company. We have invested our soul, knowledge, all our ideas and opportunities in this company, firmly believed that now nothing can stop us on the path to success, but, unfortunately, the difficulties have only multiplied ...
We are looking for a solution or make our own
The basis of any web studio is the right strategy and good tools to optimize these solutions. Of course, as a small studio, we immediately began to study various free solutions (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress) and work with it. And everything seems to be okay, but our main task - to optimize the work and reduce time wasted on the implementation of projects, we could not solve.
And now, after much deliberation - it has been decided - we create our own product on which we will do projects, evaluate the pros and cons, choose the Framework, estimate the time and get to work ... product development, we are losing even more time and resources that could be used to fulfill orders to our customers and earn money directly. We take regular loans, lend money, start having problems with timely salary payments, even before this comes the crisis of 2008 and the loan taken in dollars is multiplied twice ...
All this, of course, affects the positive thinking in the team, and therefore, the development is even more delayed ...
In the end, we are ready to launch our offspring of ImageCMS, but the question arises - whether to launch the product in a free form (which, due to the money spent, for me personally looks like something unthinkable) or as a paid solution. Since things in the company started to go a little better, and the main goal of creating this tool was to optimize the company's work, the team persuades to launch the product as OpenSource CMS.
Since the system was originally created as an engine for corporate sites and portals, and the sphere of Internet commerce began to develop very quickly, another difficult decision was made - to write an extension for creating online stores based on ImageCMS ... And again a year of development and tests.
After the launch of ImageCMS Shop, no one could ever convince me of the expediency of launching the system free of charge: constant investments in development are needed - now two versions of the system, and the system turned out to be excellent))) to enable our partners to continue working with ImageCMS, without switching to other engines for creating online stores, we also immediately introduced an affiliate discount program, which generally resolved this issue and everyone was happy.
We change thinking or not only in money happiness
We have already launched many versions of our product, have significantly expanded the staff of our team and are already well developing in the field of web development - we see a clear perspective in this matter.
The only thing that doesn’t give rest is not quite the right vision, which over the years has been formed in our team: various departments work - Sales, Development, Promotion, Startups, but all are rather separate, there is no right goal, everything is aimed only at getting direct profit ...
And, as it seems to me, the solution was created - after interviewing all employees and searching for a new positioning of the company, we decided to move on as a community, and take the already existing ImageCMS community as a basis. After informing the ImageCMS community of this idea, we received a lot of joyful feedback and full support. It was decided to completely change the official website of the system, add many new opportunities for community members and partners, allocate resources in the form of managers, programmers to support the community, and also involve all programmers of our company to develop this area.
Together with the ImageCMS community, we plan not only to develop the system, but the entire web development sphere as a whole - to create useful tools, organize conferences, share success secrets, optimize our work as a whole and look for solutions on how to make our common business profitable as developers. and for customers.
PS I recommend
Unfortunately, I have no opportunity to devote a lot of time to reading, but I want to highlight, in my opinion, very worthy materials that have changed my vision:
Richard Branson "To hell, grab and do"
Richard Branson "Nude Business"
Walter Isaacson "Steve Jobs"
Tony Shay "Delivering happiness"
ImageCMS community site (still 2.0): http://www.imagecms.net
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/140421/
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